by SETH SANDROSKY
How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon, by David Roediger (Verso, hardcover, 2008).
What began as campaigns of white settler violence against blacks and Indians lay the groundwork for the development of the American nation that “has never been without race,” unlike the rest of the world for most of its history, Roediger writes. He re-interprets how a belief in and practice of white race supremacy has persisted, parried challenges and made concessions in ways that strengthened labor and legal systems that spur land expansion and capital accumulation.
In the 1600s, elites in the British colonies of Maryland, South Carolina and Virginia, presiding over an agricultural economy that relied upon the slave trade and chattel labor system alongside white workers, began to systematize “distinctions between Europeans and Africans.” Race-based policies grew. They meshed with anti-Indian land grabs. Anti-black and anti-Indian actions intersected with male oppression of women, white and non-white, a fateful beginning. White supremacy’s roots would deepen and spread.
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